Monday, February 9, 2009

I feel lucky to live in a place like Austin where we never seem to miss a limited release movie. Especially the good ones. This weekend a little movie called Fanboys was released and wouldn't you know it Austin (the downtown Alamo Draft House in fact) was on the list. Here are the limited release cities if you are interested.

Austin, TX (1 screen)

Chicago, IL (3 screens)

Houston, TX (3 screens)

Los Angeles, CA (10 screens)

New York, NY (10 screens)

Philadelphia, PA (5 screens)

San Francisco, CA (6 screens)

Seattle, WA (3 screens)

And here's the preview:

This movie has a good cast, as you can see from the trailer, lots of cameos by admitted geeks, and of course Kristen Bell (see right). You wouldn't know it from the trailer but she plays a fairly large part in the movie. In general, I don't think that the trailer represents the actual movie, but the cameo list at the end is great.

The plot synopsis on IMDB is "Star Wars fans travel to Skywalker Ranch to steal an early copy of Episode I: The Phantom Menace," which if you watched the trailer or heard anything about the movie you already know, but what the press for this movie hasn't really shown is what really makes this movie funny: the attention to detail. There are a lot of nerdy type references from the 90s, and of course a lot about Star Wars, that really make the movie fun to watch. We had a bunch of Star Wars nerds that went together and really enjoyed ourselves and I would place this movie firmly in the good bad movie category (think Army of Darkness for another example). Now whether or not they meant it to is certainly up for debate.

If you have seen the original trilogy, liked the movies (forget all about the second trilogy if you can), and are somewhat nerdy then you should see this movie. There's no crap after credits, but it's worth the time.